On Wednesday Oct.30th, 2019 an Australian mother, Sarah Walker who is a part of a pro-vaccine Facebook group called “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” allegedly posted a message saying: “So my beautiful son [redacted] has the chickenpox at the moment and we’ve both decided to help others with natural immunity this Halloween! We have the packaging open and closing down pat and can’t wait to help others in our community”, in short, she was advertising her master plan of passing out chickenpox virus for halloween to children in the community.

While there hasn’t been any verification if the person claiming to be a Sarah Walker actually handed out disease ridden candies, nor any confirmation that Sarah Walker is a real person, as her account claimed she was a nurse at “Royal Children’s Hospital, Brisbane” which was suspicious as there was no Royal Children’s Hospital in the town of Brisbane, Australia. As reported by Australias News.com.au, “The woman’s Facebook description [claims] she works as a staff nurse at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Brisbane.” In an interview with Overland student Alexis Wiseman concerning this particular situation she stressed on the point that “Its super uncool to force your opinion on others like that.”

And even more to the questioning of the credibility of this account, the entity that oversees all the hospitals in that Australian state, Queensland Health, had a spokesperson respond directly on the Facebook post saying ,“There are no current or former employees by that name that have worked for Queensland Health as a registered nurse.” The spokesperson from Children’s Health Queensland said,“This is a serious issue and has been referred to police, who are investigating.”

While this particular case remains unproven, it bears a striking similarity to the concept of “pox parties” in which parents would bring their children together to expose them to an infectious disease in hopes that the child could “get over it” as children, due to the belief that the symptoms would be much less severe on children rather than adults. While most people realize that this isn’t the case in the modern day, it is always interesting to remember that they do still exist, and that maybe you should inspect the items given to you by strangers a little more closely.